June 03, 2008

An accomplished professional in New York, reflecting on his tenure at Harvard decades before, once told me that the most valuable thing about going to an Ivy League school is showing up, soaking up the atmosphere and figuring out that a great many of your classmates really aren't any smarter than lots of intelligent people you've known from all walks of life.

I'm reminded of his words by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who muses on his poor performance in school:

I've since gone out into the world, and worked in a profession where an
Ivy League degree is damn near a prerequisite. No disrespect, and
certainly no nod to the populist anti-intellectualism, but I'm not
impressed.

Although I am impressed by some friends who've gone to the Ivies, I think he is generally right. The fact that alumni keep giving money to institutions whose endowments are grotesquely swollen only reaffirms my opinion.

May 03, 2008

As D.C. libertarians rally around the Jefferson 1 -- you can donate here
-- consider another local put upon by the small tyrants of the D.C.
establishment. His story comes via The Dupont Current, an off-line only
freebie.

After a year and a half in business, he
said, the restaurant at 5037 Connecticut Ave. is ready to expand
outside. he requested the commission's support for an application to
build a sidewalk cafe complete with tables, chairs, planters and a
patio. New fencing on freestanding posts would surround the cafe, he
said.

A lovely American story, isn't it? Who doesn't like to see a small
businessman succeed? Who could object to such a man creating a nicer
setting for customers, stimulating the economy and contributing more to
local coffers?

But some commissioners said they were
concerned about Alefantis' past sidewalk use. "Up until yesterday, you
had a ping pong table in public space. Do you have a permit for that?"
asked commissioner Frank Winstead.

Yes, it is absurd that one needs a permit for a ping pong table. I'd be
on Mr. Alefantis' side even if he never sought one. But here is what
actually happened:

He said he had contacted the district
Department of Transportation's public space office and was informed
that, since the table could serve as a kind of advertisement for the
restaurant, it did not necessarily need a permit.

Okay, so this poor guy did due diligence, consulting some obscure
municipal office about a simple ping pong table. You're all set, his
government told him.

Some commissioners, however, remained
unconvinced. "They told you it was like a sign or a plaque? A ping
pong table is not an advertisement," said commissioner Karen Perry.

As it happens, I have seen the ping pong table. I have also considered
securing duel citizenship in some small third world nation whose
national ping pong team is poor enough that I might sneak my way into
the Olympics. In less ambitious moments, I've told my friend Chris Beam
that we should play ping pong sometime. So for me the table most
certainly served as an advertisement.

There was one commissioner who ignored these grave pragmatic concerns.

Perry said it was the principle of the
ping pong table that bothered her. "I guess my problem is I can't
approve an application for someone who has knowingly violated the law
for 18 months," she said.

Furthermore, she said, she objected to the fence with the freestanding
posts and would prefer to see planters mark the bounds of the sidewalk
cafe.

Before I note what happened, consider that all this nonsense is a
pretty major disincentive for a business owner thinking about modest
expansion. Going before the city basically gets you a bunch of scrutiny
as to whether you've ever violated a bunch of petty rules. So what did
happen?

Perry proposed that the commission not
object to the cafe, but include a series of caveats in its letter to
the Department of Transportation. The commission would alert officials
to the presence of the outdoor ping pong table, she said...The
commissioners would also note that they did not approve of a rope and
stanchions, had concerns about whether an existing ramp to the
restaurant complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and
questioned the accuracy of the drawings, she said.

Alefantis, apparently broken and resigned to the necessary groveling expected by small tyrants:

"I think they are all good suggestions... also I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by the outdoor ping pong table."

And after all that, a couple of commissioners still voted against allowing this businessman to improve his business!!

The commission passed the motion 3-2
with Klibanoff and Winstead voting against it. Alefantis promised to
move the ping pong table inside the restaurant.

I'm sure these commissioners are perfectly nice people, but their
attitudes toward the proper role of government -- petty, bullying,
imposing lots of unnecessary rules, substituting their personal
preferences for the carefully thought out aesthetic preferences of a
businessman expanding his livelihood -- are gravely flawed. If you
agree why not contact them -- politely and using reasoned arguments -- and tell them so.

April 24, 2008

Students at Brown threw a pie at Thomas Friedman, the over-ratedNY Times columnist, during a speaking engagement, an act that Matthew Yglesias dubs "funny" and that Yale student Dara Lind defends thusly:

I find the consensus in this country that the only acceptable public
action is speech to be incredibly disturbing. Pieing someone in the
face doesn’t meaningfully “prevent” him from speaking, and registers
your disapproval (and more specifically, in this case, eagerness to
show up a self-styled Man of the World for the buffoon he is) much more
effectively than an op-ed in your student paper can.... to
exclude bodily action from acceptable public expression is to resort to
a dualism that I hope we’ve moved past by now.

But there is no consensus that "the only acceptable public action is
speech" -- there is clapping, booing, turning one's back to a speaker,
holding aloft a Zippo (or, sadly, a cell phone)
to signal approval, shaking your fist, giving a standing ovation... all
of which, by the way, are more acceptable than certain kinds of speech
(e.g. racist harangues, shouting at the top of one's lungs, etc.).

Throwing pies rankles, among other reasons, because it is destructive
of public discourse. It contains less content than spoken dissent and
imposes a far greater cost: prominent speakers aren't going to address
college audiences if there is a likelihood that they'll get a pie in
the face.

"Action - and especially performance — is a legitimate contribution to
public discourse," Ms. Lind writes, as if any sort of action or
performance is justified merely due to its physical medium! Should I
ever find myself debating her in person I suppose she won't mind if I
perform an experimental ballet I've developed called "Steal her
microphone so the audience can only hear me," which ought to succeed
even if I'm hit by a pie during the raid on her podium.

April 21, 2008

April 18, 2008

Flag lapel pins
should not be mandatory for US politicians. They should not be
mandatory for anyone. They should not be the product of social
pressure. They should not be understood to reflect on anyone's
resolution to care more, or call upon the public to acknowledge how
much more they appear to care. There is nothing wrong with a flag lapel
pin, although I would not wear one regularly unless I were in the flag
lapel pin manufacturing business. But we have got to make ourselves
admit that the lapel pin is a tacky little thing that is only ennobled
by the flag put on it, and that the more patriotic work you want the
flag to do, the more the flag is actually diminished by its puny size
and the cheapness of the tin it's pressed upon.

On the plus side, as refreshing as it would be to see politicians
actually drape themselves in jewel-bestudded sashes of red, white, and
blue, in only a few moments everyone would have one, patriotism would
fuse with fashion, and instead of mandatory tacky little things we
would swim in a creped-up sea of tacky enormous things. The best the
lapel pin can say for itself is that so far it has shown no signs of
slyly getting any larger. The worst it can say for itself, however, is
what it so quickly has threatened to say for the wearer: "Rest assured,
I'm just as American as I was before this fad made me have to
metaphorically (but only metaphorically) prove it."

April 17, 2008

Since Jim Fallows sums up my feelings on the Democratic debate I thought I'd make a couple narrow rebuttals. On this blog Phillip Klein defends ABC, writing, "If this were the first debate between the two candidates, I can
understand the frustration, but given that this is the 21st debate,
it's a different story. What kind of policy discussion is left to have among two candidates who agree on virtually everything?"

It is quite right that health care and Iraq have been fleshed
out. But the president does all sorts of things that Senators Obama and
Clinton are seldom if ever asked about. Tough questions I'd like to see
include whether the candidates believe that the constitution in fact
assigns only enumerated powers to the federal government, and if so
what specific powers belong only to the states or the people; whether
the candidates believe that the War on Drugs is winnable and how they
would wage it or end it; and the candidates' views on the balance of
power between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary branches
during war time.

Another citizen might prefer that questions be asked
on animal rights, maintaining the interstate highway system, the
prudence of a regulated market for kidneys and the reasoning for our
reliance on corn based rather than sugar based ethanol. There is no
shortage of topics; moderators just confine themselves unnecessarily.

Enter David Brooks, defending the ABC debate moderators on different grounds. He says,
echoing others, that "the journalist's job is to make politicians
uncomfortable," and that it's legitimate to see how they'll respond to
symbolic issues. If that is so, however, the moderators seemed to have
failed for a different reason -- I can imagine the candidates being far
less comfortable and being asked far more symbolic questions than what
ABC mustered.

Perhaps a future debate should feature Brooks as moderator posing the following questions:

-- A black child, a white child and
a Cuban refugee child are all drowning and you can only save two. Which
two children do you save?

-- A terrorist makes a credible threat
that he will detonate a nuclear device in Manhattan unless you engage
in intercourse with the spouse of your opponent. Would you do so if
your CIA chief estimated it would afford a 10 percent chance of
averting the attack?

-- Were you widowed, terminally ill and raising a young child would you
rather arrange for its adoption by a loving gay couple or a
heterosexual spinster? Would you rather the child grow up to be gay or
mildly homophobic but happily married with kids?

-- As president will you be more concerned with protecting American
lives than the lives of foreigners? If so how many Israeli lives is an
American life worth? What about Kenyan lives? Palestinian lives? Iraqi
lives? And how does that last affect your Iraq policy?

-- If God
spoke to you, as he spoke to some in biblical accounts, and told you to
convert to Catholicism, would you? What about Islam? Mormonism?
Scientology? What if he asked you to get a sex change operation?

-- Were a cure for AIDS developed that required the slaughter of
15,000 live puppies per year for a key ingredient would you approve
their murder?

These questions may seem, and in fact are, utterly absurd, but I
am serious in suggesting that if our measure of a good question is one
that makes a candidate uncomfortable, tests their performance in a
pressure filled situation and forces them to think on their feet, my questions are superior to ABC's, which is another way of
saying that this metric for questions is fatally flawed.

April 14, 2008

Everything you ever wanted to know about elevators is now collected in one magazine article, which includes one of the best arguments against high rise public housing projects I've ever read:

Loading
up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the
button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time
the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the
alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and
the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice,
apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

Terrifying
if true, though I can't help but suspect that the word "apparently" was
inserted by an exasperated member of the fact-checking staff.